In our review of NVIDIA's latest and greatest, the GeForce GTX 480, one of our largest complaints was with regard to the heat. Even during normal gaming, we saw GPU core temps rise to as high as 96°C, which is about ~6°C away from hitting the threshold... also known as the time the card will either throttle itself down, or crash.

Oh wow, it's amusing you should post this right now. Hmm, decisions decisions...

We all know XFX decided to not release any GTX 470/480 products due to various reasons. Not many places have directly acknowledged this, but EVGA only sells the "FTW" edition of the GTX 480 as this HydroCopper part. They do not sell a standalone FTW model, which knowing their past practices pretty much says it all about how hot and power hungry these cards get.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doomsday

imagine this kind of thing on a HD5870 or HD5970 and overclock That beast!

I'll let you in on a secret. The block is Swiftech's Komodo full-body waterblock, modified for the GTX 480.

Which means, you can by a the HD 5850/5870 version if you want. Link They also make the Epsilon series for the HD5970.